For most entrepreneurs, a website is what makes their business legitimate. In fact, most plan not to open a physical storefront; rather, they choose to keep all their transactions online. Even with a physical store, a huge percentage of your potential customers would engage with your online setup before they visit the shop in person.

Your website is your first impression. It’s important that from design to content, it makes a statement because it’s one of the main drivers of traffic and conversion. While a lot of the discussions today say that it’s easy to set up a website, what is difficult is knowing how to maintain and how to maximise it.

A Facebook page isn’t a website. Note that there are customers who will look for a website link on your social media page to see if you’re a real business or not. A website should be where all the information customers need to know about your products can be found, and so it makes sense that they will engage with it first before scrolling through your Facebook page.

Just sticking with social media has its limitations like being able to publish long posts. So consider becoming a website creator first before social media marketer.

Incomplete information

Customers go to your website for three primary reasons: to learn more about who you are, what it is you offer, and to find out how to contact you best. If you can’t provide information for all three, then you might be in trouble.

Make sure that your landing pages have all the information they need to get a good picture of who you are as a business and what it is you want to provide for them. Most importantly, make sure your contact fields work. There are still people who prefer sending queries through a contact form or email than reaching out through social media.

Bad website design

While content is what gets shared, your design is what entices visitors first. Remember that website design isn’t just about the aesthetic, it’s also about the user interface and the user experience. If your website isn’t intuitive and very complicated to navigate, then that’s a sure fire way of turning away visitors. So always take the time to review not just the brand aesthetic, but also your website’s usability.

Additionally, you need to make sure that your website is mobile responsive. Around 52% of people browse websites through any mobile device. If your website doesn’t adapt to the screen’s size, your potential customers will leave your page.

No new updates

Outdated posts show that you don’t care about what goes on in your website. This tells people that you’re not bothered to update your customers. Don’t see this as sharing every bit of news happening to you, but constantly churning content through your website’s blog can be a way to show people you’re still pretty much active. Besides, it’s one way to make sure that search engines keep crawling your website.

A website is the best way to tap into a potential pool of market you wouldn’t be able to reach with a physical storefront. So make sure to avoid these mistakes while you set up your website.